students and rescues....

[paul]

I have been involved with a number of cave rescues in the Peak over the years and in my experience, the vast majority of students which were on the scene were fellow team members rather than the "rescuees".

 

[Alex]

I have been caving with a lot of students recently, I must say they tend to be far more competent, than a some non uni club cavers I go with.

 

[Joe90]

I think we could put almost all rescues down to students, after all they are poor scrounging ruffians that are malnourished and over the top with drinking and partying. Probably going caving without proper prior preparation or rest too. I say blame the students, nobody likes students anyway......

 

[CatM]

Hi Hellie,

I'm not sure exactly what your intention is for all this information (I know you've been asking all the student clubs for various other figures too), but leading on from other people's comments about frequency of caving, perhaps another way round to do it would be to ask each club how many trips they have run in the last year / x number of years and how many of them have required a rescue (and perhaps type of rescue? eg. overdue, injury)

 

[KevinR]

I have caved for the last 38 years and been involved in 3 "rescues" i.e. helping a group out of a cave - two of which eventually involved an official call out.
Of those 3 groups two were student groups.
"Lies, Statistics etc."

Kevin

 

[John S]

The problem I see with all these figures is that they can only give a general idea of underground problems. In the many years I have been caving, I think I have only been on the receiving end of one call out. But self rescues have been quite a few. As a student we called them 'epic' trips, mainly overdue or water problems. But all injuries in the parties (including dislocated shoulder, broken foot, ruptured spleen, cracked ribs....) have been self rescued so they do not show in the figures.
With such a small data set and large annual variation, statistically significant conclusions will not be produced.
So only general ideas should be suggested.

 

[kay]

Unless you are looking at trends over time, the annual variation doesn't matter - you simply lump all the data from 5, 10 years or whatever into one not-so-small database. The problems come with all the other things that have been touched on in this thread - what is a rescue (ie what about the ones where a call out has been avoided), what is a student, what is a student trip, what proportion of cavers in general are students, etc. As with any statistical analysis, the most important thing is to ask lots and lots of questions rather than to rush to gather data.

 

[nearlywhite]

Annual variation does matter - which 5 or 10 year set will you use? These are moveable goal posts which politicians famously exploit (I listen to a lot of more or less). What if you have an unavoidable anomalous year?

I take your points though Kay, it's one problem among many

 

[cap n chris]

It all seems as though it's becoming very very very complex.

 

[psychocrawler]

Note also that many of Pitlamp's exploration examples involve ULSA and MUSS, both university associated clubs with many ex-student members. Indeed, ULSA exists to cater for ex-student members of LUUSS (it has a new name now I think), so any ULSA rescues probably did not involve any actual students - I can think of one notable example of a 'rescue' in this category!

 

[kay]

Annual variation does matter - which 5 or 10 year set will you use? These are moveable goal posts which politicians famously exploit (I listen to a lot of more or less). What if you have an unavoidable anomalous year?

I take your points though Kay, it's one problem among many

Yes, not well expressed. What I was getting at is 5 years values of, say, 3,1,9,3,2  become a lot more tractable if thought of as a single sample of 18 over a 5 year period. I don't know that you can do much else than fix the time period in advance, before you've seen the data, then take what comes. Then ask lots of questions about the anomaly. You can't omit the anomaly purely for being an outlier - you need to have some other reason.

 

[cap n chris]

I'm guessing that due to the obvious complexities which clearly have sprung up, whatever topic Hellie was hoping to do is now likely to get binned on the grounds that it'll require a team of philosophers to define the question and a supercomputer to crunch the maths.

 

[Peter Burgess]

All she is doing is giving a talk, for goodness sake! Will the audience raise all these issues as post-presentation questions? I hope she has some answers.

 

[nearlywhite]

I'm not suggesting omitting data, just observing the problems of very small data sets. Doing anything but setting out time frames in advance introduces bias. Multiple data sets would be nice but hard to compare like with like.

Anomalies could be explained by callouts for serious accidents prompting people to observe callouts more seriously. It's all a bit too problematic... Numbers that aren't accurate can cause problems I.e. the illusion of safety, so I have to disagree with peter on that any effort is useful

 

[cavermark]

42

 

[traff]

42

I always thought something was fundamentally wrong with the universe.

 

[hell little caver]

Dear all thank you for some answers.... and the many things to think about.... please come to my talk at hidden earth to see if any of your options/ feeling are changed..... the will be q and a too

Love

Hellie x